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Failure is Part of Capitalism

RUSH: Have you noticed how the media, the Democrats are going nuts over Jamie Dimon and, what is it, the $2 billion trade loss at JPMorgan Chase? You know, I really do believe because capitalism has not been taught, so many people do not understand that winning and losing is part of the deal. When you have freedom, winning and losing is part of the deal. JPMorgan Chase still made a profit, despite the $2 billion loss in that one unit. But everybody now wants to get rid of Dimon and they want more regulation. And this all happened after Dodd-Frank. This all happened after a bunch of brand-new federal regulation.

But I really think that what this shows is that people of a certain age don't understand that in freedom you win and lose, and when you lose, you come back, you try again. But so many people in our culture seem to want to take any chance of loss out of the equation even if it means that everybody is simply living a life of mediocrity, that there is no excellence. Because you can't get to excellence without failure along the way, and failure simply doesn't want to be tolerated. The moment there is failure in an institution or in an individual here comes a bunch of leftists saying, "Well, we gotta get the government involved." And I know people who say, "Well, they haven't done it in sports." They are doing it in sports. They are doing it in the National Football League.

That's what this really is all about when you get down to brass tacks. And one of the reasons that sports is in some disfavor right now is 'cause it is totally merit based, and there are wins and losses, and there's personal failure and there's recovery, redemption and triumph and all these things that are part of freedom that people want to take out of the equation now, as though somehow it's intolerable, unaccepted because of the pain and suffering and the risk. And the idea that life can be painless, the idea that life can exist without suffering is ridiculous. It's absurd. But there are people with those motivations, and they do not have one foot, one toe grounded in reality. You know, in my case, I mean you could never make it to the Hall of Fame if you're afraid of failure.